Edinburgh Historical Studies of Iran and the Persian World

• Recounts the political contests between Islamists, leftists, and others culminating in one of the twentieth century’s most surprising revolutions
• Combines the sensitivity of a memoir with the expertise of a scholarly study to explore lesser-known figures and events in the Iranian revolution’s history
• Shifts the center of Iran’s revolutionary history away from its capital to its provinces in an attempt to show how the global and local interacted at multiple levels

In October 1978, a day that started like any other for Ali Mirsepassi – full of anti-Shah protests – ended in near death. He was stabbed and dumped in a ditch on the outskirts of Tehran for having spoken against Khomeini. In this book, Mirsepassi digs up this and other painful memories to ask: How did the Iranian revolutionary movement come to this? How did a people united in solidarity and struggle end up so divided?

In this first-hand account, Mirsepassi deftly weaves together his insights as a sociologist of Iran with his memories of provincial life and radical activism in 1960s and 1970s Iran. Attentive to the everyday struggles Iranians faced as they searched for ways to learn about and make history despite state surveillance and censorship, The Loneliest Revolution revisits questions of leftist failure and Islamist victory and ultimately asks us all to probe the memories, personal and collective, that we leave unspoken.

The first English-language study of the Persian prison poem

• Develops a new approach to genre, based on the political status of the prison poem
• Offers an unprecedented account of the interrelations of poetry and power in pre-modern literature
• Sheds new light on Muslim–Christian relations by documenting the multi-confessional orientation of many prison poems
• Relates the trajectory of the prison poem genre in pre-modern poetics to Iranian literary modernism, including the prison poems of Muhammad Taqi Bahar

Through a series of insightful and sophisticated readings, this book reveals the worldliness of premodern Persian poetry. It traces the political role of poetry in shaping the prison poem genre (habsiyyat) across 12th-century Central, South and West Asia. The emergence of the genre is indebted to the increasing importance of the poet, who came into increasing conflict with Ghaznavid and Saljuq sovereigns as the genre developed. Uniting the polarities of perpetuity and contingency, the poet’s body became the medium for the prison poem’s oppositional poetics.

Bringing theorists as wide ranging as Kantorowicz, Benjamin and Adorno into conversation with classical Persian poetics, this book offers an unprecedented account of prison poetry before modernity, and of premodern Persianate culture within the framework of world literature and global politics.

Analyses modernity and Orientalist discourses in Iranian millenarian movements

• Employs historical and discourse analysis to probe the conflict between orthodox and heterodox religious movements in 19th- and 20th-century Iran
• Links the conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy to the impact of modernity on Iran’s society and religion and to colonisation on India’s Muslims
• Broadens the scope of this conflict to include Palestine, Central Asia and Turkey
• Presents a postcolonial analysis of the new movements and their broader relationship to the Islamic world during the age of imperialism

Religion, Orientalism and Modernity explores the emergence of the revolutionary Babis and reformist Baha’is and their conflict with mainstream Shi’a Muslims in Iran, and of the parallel Ahmadi movement in North India. It gives fresh insights into the writings that defined these innovatory movements, penned on the one hand by their proponents, and on the other by western interpreters.

Comparing these movements shows that, together, they define important aspects of Islamic modernity. A focus on two case studies (Babis and Baha’is in Iran, and Ahmadis in India) reveals similarities and differences in their responses to a perceived need for change and renewal of religious authority.

Explores the life and legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–69) – arguably the most prominent Iranian public intellectual of his time

• A social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a seminal Muslim public intellectual of the mid-20th century
• Places Al-e Ahmad’s writing and activities alongside other influential anticolonial thinkers of his time, including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Edward Said
• Chapters cover Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s intellectual and political life; his relationship with his wife, the novelist Simin Daneshvar; his essays; his fiction; his travel writing; his translations; and his legacy

In this social and intellectual biography, Hamid Dabashi contends that Jalal Al-e Ahmad was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large.

Dabashi places Al-e Ahmad beside other towering critical thinkers of his time, showing how he personified a state of Muslim anticolonial modernity that has now disappeared behind the smokescreen of sectarian politics. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a ‘post-Islamist Liberation Theology’.

The Last Muslim Intellectual expands the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity by adding a critical Muslim thinker to it – an urgent task, if the future of Muslim critical thinking is to be considered in liberated terms beyond the dead-end of its current sectarian predicament.

An integrative multi-regional account of Persian literary history on the cusp of the modern period

• Assesses the manner in which a major Iranian nationalist motif has dominated the writing of Persian literary history
• Recovers marginalised communities and trends in Persian literary culture in Afghanistan and South Asia
• Provides 3 cases (Iran, Afghanistan, and South Asia) to offer an integrative retelling of trends in Persian literary culture in the 18th and 19th century
• Bridges the gap between Middle Eastern and South Asian studies by privileging a multi-regional frame over a regional studies one
• Creatively uses tadhkiras (biographical anthologies) to reconstruct Iranian nationalist historiography, poetic networks and literary debates
• Uses digital maps to visualise social and literary networks and textual production

Integrating forgotten tales of literary communities across Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia – at a time when Islamic empires were fracturing and new state formations were emerging – this book offers a more global understanding of Persian literary culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. It challenges the manner in which Iranian nationalism has infiltrated Persian literary history writing and recovers the multi-regional breadth and vibrancy of a global lingua franca connecting peoples and places across Islamic Eurasia.

Focusing on 3 case studies (18th-century Isfahan, a small court in South India and the literary climate of the Anglo-Afghan war), it reveals the literary and cultural ties that bound this world together as well as some of the trends that broke it apart.

Explores theological debates between Muslims and Christians in Iran in the 17th and early 18th centuries

• Provides case studies on Muslim-Christian polemics in early modern Iran
• Contributes to our understanding of interreligious relations in the Islamic world
• Advances our understanding of cross-cultural interactions in the early modern period
• Analyses the evolution of literary and rhetorical strategies in interreligious debates
• Contributes to debates on confessionalisation in the Middle East, with a focus on Shi’ism

This book explores the history of Muslim-Christian theological exchanges in Iran during the 17th and early 18th centuries. Focused on the work of the renegade missionary ‘Ali Quli Jadid al-Islam (d. 1734), it contributes to ongoing debates on the nature of confessionalism, interreligious encounters, and cultural translation in early modern Muslim empires. By disentangling the connections between polemics and other forms of Islamic learning and by emphasizing the Shi‘i character of the case in question, this study accounts for the dynamism of polemics as an ever-evolving genre capable to adapt to different historical contexts.